Minors’ Noise Metal Goes Violently Over The Edge On Their Holy Roar-Released Debut LP

Minors’ new album Abject Bodies feels like the musical equivalent of rubbing your face with a cheese grater. The fierce Canadian band have created some of the most viscerally sinister music imaginable, pushing the listener not just down into a pit of despair, but into the inner workings of a machine whose core functions like a death trap, with gears grinding into your skin from seemingly random directions while the fact that you’re bleeding proves about all that’s clear. Their music thrashes in a physically palpable fashion, inescapably driving the sense of this extremity into your skull whether you’re ready or not.

Not everyone’s going to be into a sonic torture chamber, but just to be clear — all of the above was a compliment. Falling into this sort of music in the first place is usually predicated by a sort of desire to see just how far one can go and just how much they can take. For whatever reason one might be in such a position — Abject Bodies provides a mental (and almost physical!) exercise, twisting your mind’s arm backwards until you find yourself more comfortable that way, because it’s clear — the pain won’t be ceasing to exist anytime soon. As expressed in this scenario via the noisy chaos Minors present, it remains.

Texturally, the band weave between a number of different styles, offering their own frenzied take on them all. They don’t sit in an easy category. They take the magnanimity of sludge and the mental breakdowns of noisy “mathcore” and throw them in a blender, creating something that might be reminiscent of if the members of The Dillinger Escape Plan were drunk and played a lot lower on the register.

Like before — that’s a good thing. Who knows what the musicians behind Minors were “drunk” on while crafting Abject Bodies, but whatever the drive — they’ve carved out a space that quickly proves all their own. Their songs are some of the most chaotic, heaviest, and deeply uncomfortable material that you’ve probably heard in awhile, only letting up in intensity long enough for the pain to spread like an oil slick, not fade.

5/5 Stars

Holy Roar Records unleashes the band’s debut full length on the world on February 22. If this is their debut, heaven help us all when they decide to release something else.

Listen below via Bandcamp